There are many different ways in which you can make your recordings available for others to hear, but I will simply mention my favorite website:

Go to www.box.net and click Signup to create your account. The free (“Lite”) account will do fine: you get 1 gigabyte of storage space (which is plenty) and files are limited to 10 megabyte each (which is about 10 minutes of stereo music).

The advantage of box.net is that people don’t have to download your music first: they can simply listen online.

Apparently, the Lite account is not made available to everyone. I am told you can sign up for a free 14-day trial period. After the trial period is over, you can then convert your account into the free Lite account.

When your account is created, Login and click Upload. After the file has been uploaded, click the little blue arrow on the right and choose Link to this File to get the URL to your uploaded file. This is the link that you want to give to friends so they can listen to your music.

You can upload files in any format you want, but the best option is MP3 encoded at a bitrate of 192 kbs or higher.

If you want people to listen to your piece online directly from the box.net web site — without having to download anything first — be sure to encode your MP3 as “constant bitrate” (or CBR) at 44100 Hz.

The box.net streaming player is a little picky, so if the MP3 is encoded differently, you can only download it and not stream it.

Box.net is not the only free online storage host, although most of the others have lots of annoying advertisments. Decent alternatives are MediaFire, 4shared.com and esnips.com.